Tips to Help Achieve a Better Work-Life Balance
April 12, 2021
This post was written by Jonathan Tick. Jonathan is a graduate from University of California, Riverside focused on Creative Writing. While at Gii, Jonathan hopes to sharpen his writing skills more in order to deliver more concise and enjoyable content to read. He also believes that the best things to read are not only informative, but funny too.
With the world slowly opening up again and people coming back to the office, it can be hard to readjust to either work in an office or work with a schedule that has more demanding hours. So, in coincidence with Earth Month and maintaining sustainability, it’s important to also be sustainable in the workplace to make sure that you can keep up with what you want to achieve. Achieving a good work-life balance is hard and oftentimes having a poor work-life balance means poor performance or poor output when trying to get work or tasks done. After an extended period of time, this can lead to burnout, and eventually create a negative feedback loop that results in low productivity, and in some cases, gets rid of the desire to work entirely due to both mental and physical exhaustion. With burnout becoming an increasingly more potent source of stress over the past couple of years, it’s important to know how to avoid something like this from happening.
So, in order to balance both yourself and your work, you can:
Block your Time. You can separate your work time into smaller one-to-two-hour-long chunks as a way to pace ourselves and reduce potential burnout. Parkinson’s law states that “Work expands as to fill time available for its completion.” Which means that over a typical eight-hour work period, any work that must be done within that period will take the full eight hours to do. Even if the work itself does not need eight hours to complete. This can make the work feel tedious and exhaustive, thus leading to seemingly unfulfilling output because it can feel like not enough was done over the course of a work day.
This can be avoided by creating a blocked schedule such as a two-hour work period followed by an hour-long break. In this format, a task or work can be finished in a much smaller window of time, thus creating more potential efficiency followed by a much-needed period of rest and relaxation in order to cool down both the mind and body. It's important to take care of yourself, as frequent breaks give us a way to break up the monotony in the workplace and enjoy a cup of tea before needing to go back to the desk again to file that report.
Alternatively, you can:
Create a Checklist. Making a checklist, whether it be on your phone or taped to the fridge, can also be an exceptional way to maintain a good work-life balance. Instead of forcing yourself into a rhythmic schedule of working before taking a break and repeating that cycle, a checklist gives you complete freedom to decide at your leisure when you’ll be doing something. It also lets you easily single-task and hyperfocus on the work at hand since now, you’ll be mentally prepared to tackle the daily goals you’ve set out for yourself. Plus, you get to check the little box after a completed task, and that is always, always a satisfying feeling. And that list of filled-in check marks could just be the thing that gives you the day’s fulfillment since now it’s a physical reminder that shows you how much you did that day.
With a checklist, it’s also important to set due dates for when something should be done. This will make sure that you can get tasks done on a timely basis and hopefully not replicate the “Due tomorrow? Do tomorrow.” mindset that you probably had back in high school and/or college. The earlier you get things done, the more time you have to recharge later.
In Conclusion, it’s important when trying to achieve a good work-life balance to keep your work and break times distinct from one another. Multi-tasking is very difficult if not impossible to achieve. So, if you have to take a break, make sure that that’s the only thing on your mind at the time, and vice versa when you’re working at your desk. Remember, you’re not a robot; you’re only human, so rest and relaxation are just as important as being diligent and responsible.
Lastly, treat yourself to a little something and pat yourself on the back every now and then; you’ve earned it.
